Kate LaDew is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. She resides in Graham, NC with her cats, Charlie Chaplin and Janis Joplin.
.
you find your youngest daughter
now your only daughter
swinging her sister’s rosary
back and forth back and forth
upending jesus like a carnival ride
the ones that made you sick
made you watch from behind little metal gates
as your children and everyone’s children raised their hands and screamed.
you snatch the crucifix mid-swing,
beads popping from between your youngest daughter’s fingers
your only daughter’s fingers
clutch it to your mouth, lips against the centerpiece of mary
breathing in and out in and out
eyes closed, squeezing so the whole scene is a negative in red and orange
as you lower your hand, opening it in time with your eyes
and find the imprint of christ…
View original post 171 more words
as our mother
pigeonholes
imagery
for non
believers
we smoke
for the same
child
a cigarette
to improve
the longing
of our father’s
aim
and later
disappear
from grief
like a deer
from a phone booth
Tiffany Elliott was born and raised in sunny Southern CA and is currently a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing candidate at New Mexico State University. Her works explore issues of abuse, trauma, and how recovery and resiliency allow people to remake themselves. Her poetry has previously appeared in MUSE and Pacific Review and is forthcoming in Indie Blu(e)’s “We Will Not Be Silenced” anthology.
***
For Love
I cover you in ink, the flavor harsh
on my eardrum. I eat words
ten syllables at once as we fuck
atop stacks of forbidden newsprint.
I found you spelled in grease
between the library stacks, the stains
Rorschach images of birds, of vines,
of mice that notch books, of their feces,
of tulips pressed
between pages—they had their time,
they shed petals one by one
like woodlice.
We have two words left. I
lock the pair away
behind my bared…
View original post 205 more words
review of Heather Minette’s Half Light by George Salis:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/06/20/a-review-of-heather-minettes-half-light-by-george-salis/
review of Heather Minette’s Half Light by Sara Moore Wagner:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/06/18/sara-moore-wagners-review-of-heather-minettes-half-light/
review of Heather Minette’s Half Light by Crystal Stone:
https://isacoustic.com/2018/07/09/a-review-by-crystal-stone-of-heather-minettes-half-light/
~
Half Light release announcement ;
https://isacoustic.com/2018/06/15/heather-minettes-half-light-release-announcement/
Half Light on goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40533588-half-light?from_search=true
~
for purchase:
from Barnes and Noble
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/half-light-heather-minette/1128985743?ean=9781387874200
from Amazon
dying
hasn’t been
honest
there is
no god
on the egged
boat
of god
the children
we had
we had
in the present
a stick is praying for my shadow and you say eat. your mom has a toothache but is jumping rope. I haven’t seen a man chew bread in person. you call baby a dug-up hand.
it’s not a children’s book but does have chameleons looking for their dead. I wrote it might you remember that I’ll watch anything. my brother lifting weights while he says resurrection that lonely mouthful. horror movies to win back my abuser.
The Unbnd Verses
poems, Kwame Opoku-Duku
Glass Poetry, 2018
~
‘maybe we are
bald headed
acolytes
searching for
the remains of
our masters/’ – fromvi. cowboyz
In poet Kwame Opoku-Duku’s work, The Unbnd Verses, in which each entry sets a circle free, mystery is a mere clue left for a personhood that is beyond the scope of belief. Inquiry is a beauty mark made holy by the non-answerable. If loss stops at loss, and one is ghostless, how is it that existentialism runs in the family and how much of this is real? If this is the silence of god, why can’t our lord name one person he’s had to bury? This writing is an act of hearing. And the words arrive, and the choirs listen.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
~
book is here:
with my body as a thing that existed from the waist-up, I became to swimming what I’d been to lightning and told my brothers that to dream they had to fall asleep before god touched his food. loneliness left its skinny tree and followed my mother into an outhouse where once her sister had counted smoke-rings and where twice they’d sung for their mouths the one about zero the forgotten letter. my father looked at me and I at my son. time waiting to create the sick.
kingsoftrain 